It’s the end of another month and as expected there have been lots of new social media updates.
Scheduling Posts
One of the most exciting updates of the month comes from Instagram and it’s the ability to officially schedule posts. This update is long overdue for content creators and social media marketers, however it’s finally here and currently being rolled out to users. This feature is available in the Facebook Creator Studio and we’ve already tested it.
The process is simple, you just need to connect your Instagram business account to your Creator Studio dashboard, then you’re able to add your photo and all the extra information to go along with the post. It’s worth mentioning that you can add multiple images which is something that third-party tools generally were not able to do. This update is going to make a lot of people happy and save time, however there are concerns that scheduled posts will see less engagement. As it has just been released it’s too early to say, however it’s still worth experimenting with and seeing what results you get yourself.
Optional Notifications for Replies to Any Tweet
Twitter is testing out a new option in which you can get notifications when people reply to another users tweet. In the example below you can see that you will have the option to select any tweet and be notified as people comment.
You probably have notifications on for your must-follows. Now you can get notifications when there’s a new reply to a Tweet you’re interested in! We’re testing this on iOS and Android now. pic.twitter.com/MabdFoItxc— Twitter (@Twitter) August 8, 2019
Twitter has announced that there are three options, their wording of each of these is:
- Top – Get the most interesting replies, including ones from the author, anyone they mentioned and people you follow
- All – Get every new reply
- None – You won’t get any notifications when people reply
They have only released this function to selected users so it might be a while until it’s available to everyone, since they’re only just testing it out.
Personalisation Features Built Into Refresh
You might already know that Twitter released it’s new and improved desktop experience to all users as part of a whole scale re-build of Twitter, with the aim to better align it with the mobile app. Generally the feedback has been positive, however one of the issues was that the font was too big and takes up too much space on the screen.
Twitter has now released personalisation in which you can change the font size, colour and background. There are 5 different options for font size so whether you want to fit lots of text on the screen or would prefer the font to be larger making it easier to read, it’s now simple to change this based on your needs.
Changing your profile theme colour seems to have been removed in this update however you can now switch your Twitter text to your preferred colour template. This is purely an aesthetic change for yourself so others won’t be able to see the change, it’s just for your own user experience.
The last personalisation option is that there are now two dark settings; Dim and Lights Out. These options now better cater to useage and I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter released more personalisation features in the future.
Building a Dedicated ‘Trusted’ News Section
We all know that Facebook had big issues with ‘fake news’ floating around its platform, and it has been an aim of Facebook for a while to showcase content which is from ‘high quality, trusted’ sources.
There were a lot of issues with the previous Trending News section and Facebook tried to fix the issue by replacing human moderators with an impartial, algorithm-based listing. However it had just as many issues with it highlighting and amplifying several controversial and fake reports. In repose to this Facebook decided to remove the section entirely in order to avoid the issues. They are aiming to release the new trusted content section before the end of the year and it will be interesting to see how it performs.
That’s the main social media news for August with the most popular update being the ability to now schedule Instagram posts with the official platform. We share a round-up of all the social media updates and changes each month, so sign up to our newsletter if you’re interested in keeping up to date. Also if you have any social media queries or would like advice and help managing your social media channels, you can contact us at 01865 989899 or email hello@cleverbusinesswebsites.co.uk
